But I read the article because someone tweeted it and then — stupidly — I started to read the comments. Here’s a selection of some the more offensive examples of what is clearly a major theme among the commenters:

“My dear old mother used to say: “They that lack respect for themselves and throw themsleves away, get treaded upon”. Smart lady my old mother.” (posted by: The Beak)

It’s a troubling story, and one that doesn’t appear to be an isolated occurrence.  According to National Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes, the allegation that someone with cerebral palsey has been mistaken for being drunk has been made under the Discrimination Act on a number of occasions.

About six years ago I saw UK comedian, Francesca Martinez, at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Her show was smart and funny and at times sweetly barbed. Francesca has cerebral palsy and she opened by telling the audience:  “In case you’re wondering if there’s a word for my condition . . .  it’s sober. When I’m drunk I walk in a straight line.”  (She also cut my then-boyfriend’s chest-length blond hair with a large and decidedly shaky pair of scissors, much to the horrified gasps of the audience. I couldn’t stop laughing. For weeks.)

So I can perhaps understand, to some degree, the bouncer’s initial assumption. What I find harder to understand is why security staff weren’t better trained to identify a medical condition and be able to differentiate it from severe intoxication. Especially once the suspected “drunkard” explained that he had cerebral palsy. (One can only assume that his friends would have backed him up — this detail isn’t given in the report, although it is stated that Mark Thiele was the only one in his party refused admittance.) But I wasn’t there and I don’t know what was going through the mind of the bouncer and what other concerns he might have had that night. Perhaps he was unfamiliar with cerebral palsy and how it physically affects someone. Perhaps he thought Mark Thiele was joking or lying about not being drunk. Who knows? I don’t want to damn a person for possibly making an honest mistake in misunderstanding a situation.

However the response from casino management leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. “It was certainly not our intention that Mark would have felt discriminated against and I’m sorry that he does feel that way,” said David Christian, the casino’s general manager. Is that really supposed to be an apology? I’m sorry you feel you’ve been discriminated against? I’m sorry, Mr Christian, but that’s just bullshit. Your intention and the way Mark Thiele may or may not feel about what happened actually have little bearing whatsoever on what actually happened. It’s the kind of half-arsed string of weasel words that, sadly, seems to serve too often as contrition these days.

As for example: I’m sorry if you feel that my comparison of your face to a baboon’s rear end was insulting.

See how that works? I’m not at all sorry for the insult. Hell, I’m not even admitting there was an insult. I’m just sorry you feel that way. Actually, now that I think about it, I might even be a little hurt by your implication that I was being insulting in the first place. I’m not that kind of person at all! Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe you owe me an apology.

Even worse, David Christian says of his staff: “They believe that they made the right call. I would believe that with the calibre we have and the training we put into our security officers, and the level of management that oversees it, that they would be right most of the time.”

Well, that’s fine, Mr Christian. We already know your staff believe they made the right call. I’m also willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and agree that most of the time they would, in fact, be right. But, in this particular situation, it seems that it was totally the wrong call to make. And instead of actually apologising for what is quite probably a misunderstanding due to a lack of adequate training, and thinking about how you can reduce the likelihood of it happening again, you simply blurt out airy-fairy platitudes about believing and feeling in the hopes everyone will just shut up and forget about it. (Sadly, you’re probably right on that last score.)

Look, I’m not naive. I know there are possible legal implications to an admission of wrong-doing in any form. (Isn’t that right, Mr Howard?) But come on. There are lines to be drawn between admission of regret and admission of culpability. And, you know what? In a lot of cases, all people want is a genuine apology for a genuine error and a promise to make amends in a not necessarily monetary manner.

“I’m really sorry this happened at our Casino,” David Christian could have said. “It appears to have been an honest mistake on the part of our security staff and we will look into that and make sure they are better prepared for such situations in future. We also sincerely regret any embarrassment or disappointment Mr Thiele or his friends experienced and, if they would like to come back again one night as our guests, we would be delighted to shout them all a nice dinner.”

Such a pity he didn’t feel he could say that.

(click to enlarge)

That was the extent of the post. Two paragraphs which read simply:

A resident of north Queensland has just called into Sydney radio to say the roof of their cubby house was blown off during Cyclone Yasi.

Also, reports of garage doors being battered. Some poles are down. Palm trees have of course lost fronds.

Not being familiar with Media Diary, it took me a minute to realise that it actually was, essentially, a blog post on a news site. My first reaction was that I had been directed to some facetious comment made by someone in response to a news article. Then it took me a minute or two more to parse it. Was it a bad joke being made by the writer? Was it actual reporting of someone else’s bad joke? Combine the headline (“Much ado” as in “much ado about nothing“) with the absolute lack of contextual framing, it was hard not to take it as a rather tasteless and heartless comment on the fact that the damage caused by Tropical Cyclone Yasi was not as extensive as it could have been.

I wasn’t the only one who read those two short paragraphs as a bad joke by a Sydney journo at the expense of Queenslanders. Greg Jericho wrote a furious and impassioned rebuttal. Twitter was filled with retweets and comments (some of them apparently quite vicious). My normally stoic husband, who lived in Queensland his entire life until I dragged him down to Melbourne late in 2009, went to bed fuming after composing two posts of his own and writing emails of complaint to the Australian and to Overington herself.

Today, the same link that would have taken you to the screenshot above shows a quite different page. You can click on that link now, but I’m also screenshotting this new version here because . . . well . . . who knows what might be there tomorrow:

(click to enlarge)

As you can see, Overington has “updated” her page.  True, she does flag this at the very top by beginning with the word “UPDATE” but, hang on, what exactly is it updating? The original post — those two paragraphs which upset so many people — now appear to have been completely removed. Oh, wait, I see what’s she done. There they are, italicised and re-quoted in the latter half of what essentially amounts to a brand new article, re-contextualised by self-quoted tweets demonstrating how much Overington did actually care about those in Yasi’s path, and finally a clarification of what those two paragraphs were about:

People were calling talkback radio in Sydney, and what they were saying seemed to me to be the best, the most amazing possible news: a roof off a cubby house, palm fronds down, and so forth.

So it appears that it wasn’t a tasteless joke made by anyone, but actual reporting of actual calls to radio that Overington heard and was heartened by and felt the need to share on Media Diary. For now, let’s leave aside the fact that the post was written shortly after 9am, when it could be argued that it may have been too early to draw such a conclusion. Let’s not also point out too vociferously that it might have been the people least affected by Yasi — those not searching for missing loved ones perhaps, or sorting through the rubble of their demolished houses, or surveying devastated farms — who had time to make calls to Sydney radio.

For now, let’s just consider that Overington and/or The Australian obviously realised that the original article was being ill-received. That people were angered and upset, and that the later expressed intention Overington had in writing those words had been completely lost in translation. Instead of leaving her original post as it was and appending an update to explain the context of her words, she effectively erased her original post in the problematic form in which it had been published. No one coming into this issue late will be able actually see the original artifact that became the subject of so much inflamed discussion (save for cache-mining and screenshots, of course). Self-quoting your post in a fresh article that replaces it and recontextualises it, is not even in the same ballpark. If this was print media, it would be akin to Overington knocking on the door of everyone who bought The Australian that day, handing them an errata sheet and standing over their shoulder while they pasted it on top of what was originally printed — whether they’d had time to read the original or not.

With a print edition, of course, this is merely a thought exercise. The problem with online publication is that it can be done, quite literally, with the click of a mouse. And that’s precisely what makes this an extremely significant issue. The Australian is a news site. They have a responsibility to maintain an open and transparent public record of the news and commentary they report, as well as to conserve the context of cultural artifacts — and that includes daily news diaries/blog/comments, no matter how flippant, transitory or minor such artifacts might seem to be at the time. Retractions, clarifications and apologies are an important part of journalism — but making the object of your retraction, clarification or apology disappear from the public record is not.

This is highly questionable behaviour for any journalist or media outlet. It undermines our trust. The information we have today might not be the same as what someone else saw yesterday, and what we talk about this afternoon might seem nonsensical to someone reading it tomorrow when they no longer have access to the same information. You expect this to happen on a private blog — although when private blogs become sites/sources of public conversation, then the ethics of revision and redaction also become more complicated — but on a news website? To me, that is crossing a very clearly-drawn line.

Finally, I will also note that there is not even the whiff of an apology to be found within Overington’s revamped article. There is a lot of self-defence – but I really do care! here, look at all my tweets! – a smattering of disbelief  — how can you think I would be so callous and ghoulish! — as well as the contextual clarification — someone really did call the radio! I just wanted to share the amazing news! — and that’s pretty much it. There is no acknowledgment of that fact her original article upset a lot of people — she addresses just one person, Greg Jericho, and in a particular rather than a representational sense — and there is no certainly no feeling of culpability for an article poorly written and open to obvious and understandable misinterpretation. In fact, the only person Overington seems to feel has been wounded here is herself, having been “saddened” by what Jericho said about her.

It’s disheartening to see people unable to make a simple apology for fear of, what? Losing face? Admitting that you make mistakes and are occasionally guilty of acting in haste or in error?

Maybe now is also a good time to note that, as alluded to at the end of Overington’s updated post, Greg Jericho has since written a lengthy reflection of his own blog post in which he apologises for its tone and acknowledges it was a little over the top. The manner in which he expressed his reaction, that is; not the reaction itself and not his interpretation of Overington’s original post:

But the more I thought about it, the more I knew I had missed the mark. Not by much. It isn’t so much what I wrote about was wrong, but the way I went about it.

It’s an excellent piece of self-analysis on the part of a blogger and well worth reading. More importantly, Jericho did not remove, edit or replace his original post. It remains within its original context, and you can still read it in its entirety. The only alteration is the addition of brief updates, appended clearly at the end: an apology and a note about the future moderation of comments (seems things got a little heated over there as well).

Now that’s what I call online integrity.

In this appalling article from the Courier Mail yesterday, Dr David van Gend, a Toowoomba GP and member of the  Family Council of Queensland, attacks the legalisation of gay marriage on the grounds that gay marriage = gay parenting = damaged kids. What upsets me most is the conservative assumptions about marriage and child-rearing that underlie his argument, an argument he is disingenuously trying to frame around the concept of child welfare when really it’s just dyed-in-the-wool homophobia. I’d love to get the chance to cross-examine Dr van Gend on some of these assumptions but I don’t see that happening. Or do I? ***

KMcD: Dr van Gend, you seem to be implying that homophobia and discrimination against the gay community are not driving forces behind your anti-gay marriage stance. I note that you even observe that “two lesbian women may be model citizens” — which is very progressive of you indeed. I bet you even have some gay friends. So, in your opinion, what is the central issue of the gay marriage debate?

DvG: The gay marriage debate, at its heart, is not about the rights and needs of the adults, but of the child.

KMcD: Oh, I see. You’re not actually anti-gay, you’re pro-child. That makes all the difference. So what “rights of the child” are we talking about specifically?

DvG: A child needs at least the chance of a mum and a dad in his or her life and same-sex marriage makes that impossible. The violation of this fundamental right and profound emotional need of a child means – from the child’s perspective – that gay marriage is deprivation, not liberation.

KMcD: You’re saying that a biologically male and a biologically female parenting figure are both necessary to bring up a child. That having either two “dads” or two “mums” — or only one of either, for that matter — is necessarily harmful?

DvG: The “marriage” of two women would deprive an adopted boy of his role model for being a man, and the “marriage” of two men would deprive a growing girl of a mother to learn from and confide in.

KMcD: I see — wait, no I don’t. Boys need fathers as role models but girls need mothers as teachers and confidants? Don’t girls need role models too? Don’t boys need someone to confide in, to learn from? Isn’t either gender appropriate for any of these roles? You can’t actually be implying that girls don’t need fathers and boys don’t need mothers, or that intra-family relationships should be segregated according to gender. I’m sure I must have misheard you.

DvG: Gay parenting means depriving a child of either his mother or his father.

KMcD: All right, moving on. Can you outline your perception of marriage as a social and legal institution?

DvG: Marriage is a compound right and includes the legal right to children. The normalising of same-sex marriage would mean that gay couples would have equal standing with male-female couples for adopting children.

KMcD: Do you mean to say that marriage is just about having kids? Because I’m married and I don’t intend to have children. Ever. But I consider my marriage to be just as valid and important and affirming to myself and my husband as the marriages of couples with children. Marriage is about love and commitment to another person, a commitment which may include starting a family but which equally may not. I would imagine that there are a lot of gay couples out there who wish to marry but do not plan to have children either — doesn’t this complicate the idea of gay marriage being about the rights of (yet, possibly never, to be born) children?

DvG: The sentimental claptrap that passes for debate on gay marriage would have disgusted even that old atheist philosopher, Bertrand Russell.

KMcD: Excuse me? What does Bertrand Russell have to do with this?

DvG: Russell understood that society has no interest in passing laws about people’s private affairs and that the primary reason for the public contract of marriage is to bind the man to the woman for the long task of rearing their children.

KMcD: Surely you don’t agree with Russell that men have to be legally bound to their wives in order to be forced to share the child-rearing? There are a lot of families in which the parents are in a healthy defacto relationship, or divorced and still sharing the responsibilities for their kids.

DvG: The legal institution of marriage buttresses a biological phenomenon for the sake of social stability. It is society’s way of binding a feral-by-nature male to his mate and his child, in order that a child can benefit from the complementary nurture of both a mother and father.

KMcD: Feral-by-nature? Yikes!

DvG: As Russell wrote in Marriage and Morals: “It is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognisance of by a legal institution.” Homosexual relations do not give rise to children, so such relations are of no institutional importance to society.

KMcD: Okay, since we’re quoting Bertrand Bloody Russell, he also said stuff in that book like “marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution”. Not to mention advocating that men — but only men — be liberated from the quaint old notion of sexual fidelity within marriage.  So perhaps we can leave Russell the hell out of contemporary marriage debates, and you can tell me — in your own words — what you think marriage really is.

DvG: The biological triple-bond of man and woman and child is nature’s foundation for human life, not a social fad to be cut to shape according to political whim.

KMcD: Right. And people who advocate gay marriage are?

DvG: So out of touch with nature that they think that abolishing a mother will be of no consequence.

KMcD: Or a father, one assumes.

DvG: Think from the child’s perspective. A little girl should not have to look up and see two erotically involved men posing as her “parents”. No matter how competent and caring a lesbian partner may be, she can never be a Dad to a young boy. Little children must not be subjected, by the law of the land, to a prolonged and uncontrolled experiment on their emotional development.

KMcD: I agree, no little girl should have to see two “erotically involved” men (or women) “posing” as her parents. Sounds kind of freaky to me. But that’s not what’s going in, is it? She is looking up and seeing two loving people who are her parents and who also happen to be two men (or two women). Your suggestion that a gay couple can only ever “pretend” or “pose” as parents is actually a different argument to your comments about role models. You seem to be saying that gay people are actually incapable of parenting and that it is their homosexuality (along with their presumably rampant obsession with sex and erotica) that is damaging to a child in their care. That’s just a tad more extreme than what you published in the Courier Mail, isn’t it?

DvG: For the sake of all children yet to be born we must despise threats of “hate speech” and say out loud that every child needs the love of a father and a mother.

KMcD: Um, okay. To sum up, you think that a) marriage is all about child-rearing and that without the child-rearing component, there is no need for marriage; b) children should all have both a mother and a father in their life, as those brought up without either or both such parental figures are disadvantaged and perhaps harmed; c) because gay couples are by definition single gender relationships, such couples should not be allowed to have children who would then suffer the nebulous and undocumented disadvantages of which you speak; and therefore d) because they shouldn’t have children, gay people don’t need to get married. Have I pretty much covered it?

DvG: Bertrand Russell.

KMcD: Oh yes, and you think that a book on marriage written in 1929 by a man who was had no less than three marriages that ended in divorce, should serve as some sort of a moral compass on the issue. Anything else you’d like to add?

DvG: 86 per cent of Australians, according to a 2009 Galaxy poll, affirming that children should be raised by their own mother and father.

KMcD: You know, I’ve tried to find that Galaxy Poll but to no avail. The closest I’ve come is this press release from the Australian Family Association in November 2009 which states the same 86% figure but reports the exact question that respondents were asked as being, “Ideally, wherever possible, should children be raised by their biological mother and their biological father?” Hmm. Doesn’t say anything there about same-sex parenting. In fact, “yes” seems a very reasonable response to the question and I kinda wonder about the 14% who said “no”. Because if you’re talking about “ideally” and “wherever possible” then I think most people would agree that the parents who make the babies should raise the babies. It makes good social sense for everyone.

But you’re using this response (which the AFA doesn’t contextualise within the full Galaxy poll either) as meaning we don’t want gay people to raise children. Really, though, you could make it mean anything, including evidence of opposition to all forms of adoptions, or child-rearing by step-parents, grandparents, siblings, foster parents and so on. Of course, I’m sure you don’t consider these types of family structures to be inherently “harmful” to children. So why the special attention to a family structure where the parents happen to be of the same sex?

DvG: There are already tragic situations where a child is deprived of a mother or a father – such as the death or desertion of a parent. Some broken families reform as a homosexual household and nothing can or should be done about that, but such tragedy and brokenness should not be wilfully inflicted on a child by the law of the land.

KMcD: I’m going to presume you were referring to “death or desertion” when you speak of “tragedy and brokenness”, and not a “homosexual household”. But talking about the law of the land, this October 2010 Galaxy Poll found that 62% of respondents answered yes to the question, “Do you agree or disagree that same sex couples should be able to marry in Australia?” Isn’t this the sort of data that politicians should be considering more seriously when debating changes to the Marriage Act?

DvG: Inner-city Greens and muddled MPs are wrong and any such legislation would be moral vandalism.

KMcD: You don’t think it’s a kind of moral vandalism to undermine and devalue human relationships, and to refuse to acknowledge that there are, and always have been in human society and in nature, many different kinds of healthy, functional and positive family structures?

DvG: A baby needs the love of both her mother and her father! How can anyone with normal experience of life question that?

KMcD: A normal experience of life?

DvG: No politicians have the authority to so violate the primal needs of a child or mess with the deep sanity of nature.

KMcD: The deep sanity of . . . oh dear.

DvG: Anger with such governmental child abuse is entirely consistent with neighbourly friendliness to those fellow citizens afflicted with same-sex attraction.

KMcD: Allowing same-sex couples to raise children is governmental child abuse? Well, at least you’re being nice and neighbourly about it! After all, those stubborn gay people could be cured of their pitiable affliction if they really wanted to be and then presumably they could enter into heterosexual marriages and have kids the natural way. I don’t suppose you’ve ever entertained the notion that if there is any harm or disadvantage in being raised by two parents in a same-sex marriage, then maybe this is due to the thinly-disguised homophobia of supposedly compassionate people such as yourself who refuse to acknowledge the validity of same-sex relationships and thereby allow anti-gay sentiment, action and inaction to continue in our society, our schools and our workplaces?

DvG: A little child needs both a mother and a father. The judgment of anyone who cannot see this as a self-evident fact of life, as the most commonsense and necessary condition of a child’s wellbeing, is suspect.

KMcD: I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

∞

*** David van Gend’s opinion piece in the Courier Mail was previously published on 15/11/10 in the conservative quasi-Catholic webzine Mercator.net. He published a similar but more blatantly vicious article on 13/9/09 on the same site (where some of the comments are quite vile). I have taken quotes from both sources to construct my mock interview, as well as linking to other articles Dr van Gend has published online.

∞

No one wants to miss out. On the End Times, on the Singlarity. On Peak Oil, which I see certain folk talking about in the same eager terms, looking forward to it in some bizarre subconscious way, disappointed every day civilization does not fall. No one wants to be the generation that just missed being part of the greatest story ever told.

∞

An excellent, insightful piece about the incidental misogyny of cyberspace from a life-long (female) gamer which also touches upon other media/entertainment:

As far as movies go, women spend equally, and women are more likely to spend on books. However, authors and screenwriters know that a woman will see a movie/read a book that appeals to men while the reverse is less likely, so markets skew male and a male-focused product is believed to do better than a female-focused one because of this crossover discrepancy between the sexes.

[The above quote reflects a piece of "conventional wisdom" I hear bandied about a lot these days -- and which probably deserves a post all of its own which I may or may not get to one day -- and it both saddens and irritates me.  I would like to hope that a lot of men are just as saddened and irritated. After all, isn't it implying that men are more narrow-minded than women, that they won't step outside their comfort zone or move beyond what's familiar to them, that they are incapable of engaging with or being entertained by anything that isn't all about them? I don't believe this is true, I really don't. I would hate to think that I'm wrong. Hmm, yes, possibly a longer post about all this later.]

∞

Paula Guran, the editor of the new The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror anthology series from Prime Books is calling for submissions from writers and publishers. This is a reprint anthology so she’s only reading material published during the calendar year of 2010. Get to it!

∞

Angela Slatter’s debut short story collection, Sourdough and Other Stories, is now available for pre-order from Tartarus Press. As Rob Shearman says in his Introduction:

Sourdough and Other Stories manages to be grand and ambitious and worldbuilding-but also as intimate and focused as all good short fiction should be . . . The joy of Angela Slatter’s book is that she’s given us a set of fairy tales that are at once both new and fresh, and yet feel as old as storytelling itself.

Go on, you know you want a copy.

∞

And finally, because it is my blog after all, Sue Bursztynski has written a review of Madigan Mine over at January Magazine. But be warned, there are what some people might consider spoilers in this one.

∞

“That’s okay,” she said cheerfully, “You were having fun.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t think ‘fun’ is the right word.”

One of the gym staff happened to be walking past. “Don’t say that! Of course you’re having fun!”

I think I smiled at her. It might have been a grimace. She came up to me twice more during the session. “Are you enjoying yourself now?” Big cheesy grin. “You must be having fun now!” Knowing wink. It is testament to my tolerance for such situations that the woman is still walking. Still grinning. Still winking. And that I will continue to go the gym every morning despite her.

But no, I do not find it fun. And that’s okay, it doesn’t have to be fun. I get satisfaction out of a good workout. I like the feel of my muscles working and the energy I have for the rest of the day. I understand the importance of health and fitness and know that my relatively sedentary lifestyle means I have to address this via the somewhat ‘artificial’ means of a gym workout. That’s all fine. I’m on board with that. I don’t need fun as a bribe.

I think this attitude is becoming far too prevalent these days. Why does everything have to be fun? It’s so bloody infantile, not to mention flippant. There is a difference between fun and satisfaction, and you can certainly enjoy and appreciate something in a meaningful and rewarding context without necessarily having fun while you do so. I don’t think it is a distinction the gym staffer was willing to make, and that’s what irritated me.

No, I wanted to tell her, I’m not having fun. If I could take a pill or press a button and get the same benefit as working out here, I would damn well do it and save myself the time. I’m not here for the fun of it. But I am here. And you don’t have to try and make me feel as though I’m having fun in order to keep me here. Fun is not my motivation, but my motivations are sound and they will keep me coming back. So long as you’re not chirping in my face every morning, demanding to know if I’m having fun yet!

All of which made me think about writing on the walk back home. (See, there was a point to that diatribe.) For me, the act of writing is rarely fun. It’s difficult and often frustrating and it can be tedious and scary and occasionally soul-destroying. But what I do get from writing is satisfaction, especially when I find just the right way to say something or when I finish a piece that really, really works. Of course, there is a lot of fun that surrounds the actual writing. The spark of a new idea, the planning stages — when I’m really just playing around inside my own head without worrying about needing to find the words for it all — and most of the extra-curricular activities that go along with being a writer.

But the writing itself — the actual process — is almost never fun. Which is fine with me. Because it is satisfying and rewarding and necessary, and all of that is more than motivation to keep me going back to the laptop. Just don’t bounce around while I’m there, telling me that I must be having fun now, right? Right? Right?

Because I shall quite possibly stab you in the face with a teaspoon.

But I accidentally read something today which reminded me why I’m on a quasi News Fast. There’s some new self-help book just published called Changing Relationships by a Dr Malcolm Brynn. (No, you google it, I honestly can’t be arsed.) In the review-posing-as-news-story, Dr Brynn has the following to words of wisdom to impart:

If you had a very passionate first relationship and allow that feeling to become your benchmark for a relationship dynamic, it becomes inevitable that future, more adult partnerships will seem … a disappointment. The solution is clear: if you can protect yourself from intense passion in your first relationship, you will be happier in your later relationships.

Now, maybe he’s being misquoted out of context, or whatever. My leftist sensibilities insist on giving benefit of doubt here, but really, what I want to say is: Fuck you, Dr Brynn, fuck you very much.

Protect ourselves from intense passion? Protect ourselves? So, what, we can better put up with being bereft of intense passion for the rest of our lives? What you and your ilk really mean is, put up with being bereft of intense passion in all aspects of our lives, right? Put up with putting up, because that’s what happiness is all about. Being content. Not rocking the boat. Being grateful for what we have. Excising the desire for social change. Excising desire for personal change. Excising desire, full stop. Except, of course, for the desire to buy that massive plasma screen television with the surround sound home theatre system and latest must-have game console, which will make us so very, very happy.

Protect myself from intense passion?

Really. Truly. Fuck you very much.

Obviously, I need to maintain my fast just a wee bit longer.
 

In a landmark finding, Justice Michael Adams today upheld a decision convicting a man of possessing child pornography after the cartoons, depicting characters modelled on Bart, Lisa and Maggie engaging in sex acts, were found on his computer.

The main issue of the case was whether a fictional cartoon character could “depict” a “person” under law.

“If the persons were real, such depictions could never be permitted,”Justice Adams said in his judgement. “Their creation would constitute crimes at the very highest end of the criminal calendar.”

Alan John McEwan had been convicted in the Parramatta Local Court of possessing child pornography and of using a carriage service to access child pornography material, the latter of which has a maximum penalty of 10 years’ jail.

The male figures in the cartoons had what appeared to be human genitalia, as did the mother and the girl depicted in the cartoons.

The magistrate had said that had the images involved real children, McEwan would have been jailed.

However, he was fined $3000 and required to enter into a two-year good behaviour bond in respect to each of the charges.

McEwan appealed the decision arguing that fictional cartoon characters could not be considered people as they “plainly and deliberately” departed from the human form.

But Justice Adams agreed with the magistrate, finding that while The Simpsons characters had hands with four fingers and their faces were “markedly and deliberately different to those of any possible human being”, the mere fact that they were not realistic representations of human beings did not mean that they could not be considered people.

Justice Adams said the purpose of the legislation was to stop sexual exploitation and child abuse where images are depicted of “real” children.

However it was also to deter the production of other material, including cartoons, that could “fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children.”

He dismissed the appeal and ordered each party to pay its own costs as it was “the first case dealing with [this] difficult issue.”

So this poor guy has to shell out three grand plus costs and wear a good behaviour bond for four years (what, he isn’t allowed to go and see Disney movies?) and have this vile charge on his criminal record all because he had some smutty Simpsons porn on his hard drive? Fuck, I think I have some smutty Simpsons porn on my hard drive. I know I remember getting some emailed to me by someone at some stage so it’s probably still cached somewhere. Or maybe that was the old computer. The point is, in what fucked-up Salemesque world is smutty drawings of fictional cartoon characters the equivalent of kiddie porn? What fucktard was responsible for taking this guy to court in the first place? How on earth can this be considered a “difficult issue”?

Kiddies and cats, you better burn all your manga and hentai now. Especially your hentai.

On Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope last night, he interviewed Wendy Whiteley, ex-wife of the late artist Brett Whiteley. Andrew asked about when Wendy first met Brett and sat for him, nude, at the age of 15. “Oh, we can’t talk about that,” Wendy chided. “That sort of thing is illegal. Let’s just say I was 16.” She was being slightly-but-not-really flippant and slightly-but-not-really funny but the point was well taken. The grey area of sexuality, the even greyer area of artistic freedom.

A few years ago I wrote a story, called “Louisa”, which would now quite probably be considered either tantamount to child pornography or an apologia for paedophila. Naturally, I would consider it be neither.  After being bounced back by several editors (providing a couple of the most vitriolic rejections I have ever received), the very brave Trent Jamieson published it in his now defunct Redsine. It’s a good story. A nasty and horrible story, but a good one. It presses uncomfortable buttons and it’s a piece of which I’m still very proud. I have the very sad feeling, though, that if I were ever to have a collection published, “Louisa” might not be included. Certainly not if it was a mainstream publication.

I used to be rabidly anti-censorship. I still am, actually, but I no longer bore friends to the point of tears with my rants and I no longer go out of my way to acquire material which has been “refused classification” (the sanitised way we Australians have of saying “banned” so we can pretend we don’t do that sort of thing here) just to for the sake of it and I no longer hiss beneath my breath when the OFLC classification advisory comes up before movie previews. I got very sick of being angry and frustrated over this shit all the time and so I very deliberately tuned out. I stopped keeping ultra-close tabs on the Wowsers and the Fucktards. I unsubscribed to the Eros Foundation newsletters. I no longer read OFLC reports. I tried to be a grown up. It worked, for a little while.

But lately, with the Bill Henson case and other bits of fucked-upedness surfacing all over the place, the old familiar anger and frustration has started to bite again. I’m not sure what to do with it yet, but I’m not ready to pack it away this time.

Suddenly, being an Aurealis Award finalist doesn’t seem quite so important in the grand ole scheme o’ things. But it’s still very shiny.

I’ve just heard that the police investigation might be extended to some images in the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery (purchased in the early 90′s, with not a single complaint from the viewing public). And the yellow-bellied Albury Regional Art Gallery voluntarily pulled three of their Henson works from exhibition yesterday.

It makes me seethe.

The current societal concern about paedophilia and child abuse is bordering on – some might say crossed over into – outright hysteria.

Of course children have a latent sexuality. Adolescents more than latent. And adults have a different kind – or many different kinds – of sexuality again. It’s perfectly normal and healthy for kids to muck around with kids in the sexuality arena, and for teenagers to muck around with teenagers. Serious problems arise when adults get involved and impose their own sexuality (and inherent power imbalance involved) on children and adolescents.

Ironically, sadly, while Henson is not doing this, his detractors certainly are.

The attitude that ANY nude – hell, naked, let’s dispense with the arty words and say NAKED – photograph of a child or teenager is inherently pornographic and sexualised (in the way adults perceive sexuality) is simply vile. It imposes the paedophilic mindset on all of us. Naked babies in TV commercials, children modelling underwear in KMart catalogues, works of art in galleries … we are now forced to look at such images with a paedophilic gaze. Worse: toddlerspaddling unclothed at the beach, and happy snaps of our own children (and of  our younger selves?) shrieking bare-skinned beneath summer sprinklers or splashing in bubble baths, become things we are unable to view without at least a niggle of unease.

I resent it more than words can express.

Moreover, it’s dangerous. If all images of naked children, if the naked children themselves, become imbued by default with an adult sexuality then how few small steps does it take to normalise a sexual attraction on the part of an adult for a child? Or to justify acting upon such an attraction? (Hell, it’s the guiding philosophy behind those MAMBLA cunts.)

The following image disturbs the hell out me. It’s a reproduction of one of Henson’s images from the Sydney gallery at the centre of police investigations. The pixellation and black bar have been added by the online media outlets that have published stories about the Henson case. I have seen the image several times now in various places on different days.